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Friday, April 26, 2013

A lot of times when watching a surrealist film it’s a lot
like watching a dream, but when viewing the Czech fantasy/horror Valerie and Her Week of Wonders it
really feels like I’m the one that’s dreaming, wondering when someone is going
to wake me. Here, the thoughts and images of the subconscious mind pervade, and the effect
is that of surrealist automatism applied to film making. Saying the film is
beautifully dreamlike, disorienting, and hallucinatory should not be mistaken as fan-boy code
for a beautiful looking inept film with a messy plot. It’s actually quite the
artistic achievement. The music and imagery are magical, to say the least, and
the events are the stuff of
dreams and nightmares of the child’s mind in the early stages of maturity, the
accumulated fantasy-influenced imagination gathered during childhood coupled
with the fears and wonders of a young girl’s coming-of-age.

The plot centers
entirely around thirteen year old Valerie (Jaroslava
Schallerová) and her first day (or week, I can't quite tell) of being a woman. She loves flowers, birds,
and fruit, and her safety and security are connected to her magic earrings
given to her by her mother, whom she knows to be deceased along with her
father. She lives with her Grandmother (Helena
Anýzová), and frequently consoles with a boy named Orlik (Petr Kopriva), whose creepy father, the Weasel
(Jirí Prýmek), a
boogeyman and one of the antagonists of the story, is a dead ringer for Nosferatu. Her world is
like that of a fairytale, and her innocence and purity as well as her own
wellbeing are threatened by a lecherous religious leader, Gracián (Jan Klusák), and vampires. Thankfully
she has those magic earring pearls.

Monday, April 8, 2013

Comics have had their fair share of controversy, dating
back to the ‘40s and ‘50s, most notably with the book Seduction of the Innocent by Fredric
Wertham in 1954, where mature comics were practically demonized and said to
contribute to juvenile delinquency. Wertham’s
status as a respectable child psychologist gave his book merit, resulting in a
national boycotting of comics, and so the
Comics Code Authority seal-of-approval came about. The seal was used on the
cover of comics to assure parents that the stamped comic complied with the censorship
standards and guidelines set forth by the Comics
Magazine Association of America. Nevertheless, this restriction put
numerous comic companies out of business, and the industry took a huge blow.

Italy
had its own comic code stamp introduced in 1962, known as the “Garancia Morale” seal-of-approval. However,
when the comic series Diabolik was
created by sisters Angela and Luciana Giusanni of the Astorina publishing house in 1962, they
avoided being restricted by the boundaries that adhering to a moral stamp-of-approval
would cause by declaring outright on the cover that the material was for adults. Ultimately,
the dark, murdering antihero Diabolik was
a huge hit and numerous similar title characters (usually with a K in the
title) sprang up, such as Kriminal, Mister X, Sadik, and Satanik, and
the fumetti neri genre eventually became increasingly more violent and erotic.
It ultimately grew to be very controversial, so much as to create moral panic,
with the publishers of Diabolik eventually
facing criminal charges.

The fumetti neri genre that started with Diabolik, nonetheless,paved the way for adult themed comics. One of the most popular controversial Italian comic artists of the time was
Guido Crepax, and the erotic comic
series he’s most known for, Valentina,
was adapted to film by Corrado Farina as
Baba Yaga, a cult Eurohorror that’s
a real surreal oddity.